ParallelDots – on a mission to help publishing houses get the most out of their buried archives

One of the significant problem with the online publishing industry today is their inability to get any benefit from the content they have created in the past. There’s a lot of great content sitting dormant that never gets the opportunity to go viral, and Noida based ParallelDots aims to solve that.

The startup has made a simple widget that gets embedded just below the article on the webpage of any publisher. It contextually recommends relevant articles from their archive to a user such that it forms a timeline around the theme of the article. Publishers benefits from its widget by providing their end-users with better user experience, which in turn results in higher user retention rate, and higher average time-spend per user on their website.

For users, ParallelDots works as a data miner. “With so much data being generated on a daily basis on Internet, users have already started facing issues of information overload and it often gets difficult to keep track of any event and how it has evolved over years,” said Angam Parashar, one of the three co-founders at ParallelDots. Their algorithm automatically calculates a user interest in the publishers’ archive and generates timelines across those themes – on the publishers’ web page itself. So every time a user reads an article, ParallelDots generates the timeline of the main themes of the article on the fly.

In long run, the team foresees their product as a one stop content discovery platform for the new as well as the old content, given that the market size for such a product is huge.

Print Media is already on a decline in west and all the publishers are focusing on the digital content. In India as well, online news reading has seen a huge surge lately. This industry is growing at the rate of 7% annually and is expected to reach $11 billion USD by the end of 2016.

Launched in January, the startup is currently working as a part of Times Internet’s TLabs. Ghumakkar.com and NewsInShorts are the first few publishers the startup is working with. The team claims that their widget is generating the click through rate of more than 10% and driving a lot more traffic on the old articles for its beta users.